Academia: November 2003 Archive Page

Dellavalle's concerns reflect those of a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. | Another study, published in January, found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the URLs referenced in articles in two computing journals were inaccessible within four years. --Rick Weiss --Web sites vanish so fast scientific papers just can't keep up... (SF Gate)

I wonder how many of these broken URLs are caused by the actions of webmasters who temporarily publish articles for free, and then pull them behind pay-per-view walls. A researcher who cites a URL that appears to be free may not know it has an expiry date. FYI, the above article originated from the Washington Post, whose free articles expire after a few weeks.

If students cannot find the answers but must make the answers, they are less apt to pass off others' ideas as their own. The secret is to pose or ask students to pose questions or problems and decisions which have never been adequately answered. --Jamie McKenzie --The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age (From Now On)

This article, from 1998, was prophetic. It argues that the "find out about X" assignments that used to require a lot of reading and persistence are today so trivial, and so many of these answers are already posted online, that we do our students a disservice and encourage them to cheat. If they realize it's busywork, and that their teachers themselves couldn't be bothered to come up with a challenging assignment, then how can we possibly expect them to become intellectually invested in it?

I try to impress upon my freshmen the fact that in high school, they were often rewarded for producing, on demand, the answers that were already printed in the back of the book or in the teacher's guides. (I always contextualize my statements about high school by observing that high school teachers have to teach a lot more students, and that they have more disciplinary problems, so I don't want to sound as if I'm slamming high school teachers.) But one day, they may have to speak at a city council meeting and present a reasoned argument for why a new road bypass should take route A (the one that does not destroy their house) instead of route B; or, one day their spouse might convert to a religion that they personally find morally reprehensible; or, they might be told that, due to a budget cut, they will have to write up a report that recommends which one of their three equally-competent assistants should be fired. A liberal arts degree is supposed to give students practice exposing themselves to new ideas and making sense of the world through multiple and varied viewpoints.

Even in upper-level courses, I find students -- some of whom are in the ed school -- asking me, "What do you want me to write?" as if I already have memorized the one and only correct answer to "Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?" or "How Personally Culpable was Torvald for Nora's Plight?"

Dear Professor Jerz,

Associate Vice-President Rodd Webb has forwarded me your concerns about the reproduction of your work on a York based website without proper citation. I am writing first of all to apologize for York's delay in responding to your concerns.

The essay has now been removed from the website, and the issue of plagiarism will be pursued according to the Faculty of Arts' quite stringent regulations and procedures governing academic integrity. I will inform you of the outcome in due course.

I am sorry indeed that York should be in any way complicit in the improper reproduction of your work, and I apologize without reservation.

Sincerely,

Heather Campbell
Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts
Associate Professor, Department of English
S928 Ross Building
York University Plagiarized EssayE-Mail)

I complained publicly, so now it's only fair to publicly prolcaim my appreciation that York U is taking the situation seriously. The e-mails from York just keep coming... and I'm sure that the York faculty and administrators will end up investing a hundred times more energy than the students in question saved by not bothering to cite my work properly.

It's a peculiarity of scholarly life that everyone is expected to be able to deliver a lecture well, but almost no one is trained to do it....If you put your bulleted ideas up on slides, your audience will look at the slides, not at you. You'll also be teaching them that What You Have to Say Can Be Summarized in a Few Words. Can it? --William Germano --The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver  (Chronicle)

Here's one of my suggestions for organizing oral presentations... plan in advance what you will cut if you run short of time. I've attended far too many lectures in which the speaker has prepared three examples, but the whole audience got the speaker's point after the second example. Save time for the conclusion, and if your first or second example runs long, cut it out altoghether. And don't announce, "I'm going to cut my third example," just don't mention it, and launch right into your conclusion.

Hugh Kenner, the literary critic who died on Monday aged 80, wrote on subjects as diverse as geodesic mathematics, the cartoons of Chuck Jones (creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd) and the effect of modern technology on literary imagery; he was best known, however, as a leading authority on American and Irish modernist writers, in particular Ezra Pound and James Joyce. --Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) (Telegraph)

Kenner's book The Mechanic Muse was an important influence on my own dissertation. I never met the man, and I only quoted him a few times in my thesis, but when I first read an example of his technique for critiquing the technological images in literature, it was love at first sight. He hobnobbed with Marshal McCluhan, visited Ezra Pound in the insane asylum.

Wow. What a blogger he would have made.

Thanksgiving and Spring 2004 PreviewLiteracy Weblog)

Tomorrow (Thursday) will be Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S. -- a time for turkey feasts and family gatherings. I'll probably blog a bit when I get the chance, but I'm also preparing syllabi for next semester.

I'll be teaching the second half of "Seminar in Thinking in Writing," a course in "Media Aesthetics" (the focus will be on new media, naturally), "Introduction to Literary Studies" (a Whitman's Sampler for the creative writing, literature, and new media journalism majors), and American lit from 1915 to the present. I'll also continue my supervision of the student paper.

As long as I'm downloading current events, I just heard that my proposal for a conference presentation on students' emotional investment in their academic weblogs has been accepted at the CCCC computer connection, so I'll be in San Antonio for a weekend in March. Yippie tye ye yay!

--done! (dr jill/txt)

Congratulations to Jill Walker, whose Ph.D. defence was closely watched in certain parts of the blogosphere.

Untenured radical flirts
attend MLA meetings in skirts,
feathers, tassels and suits,
with leatherette boots
Rendered wholly from Savile Row shirts

--Kieran Healy (see first comment) --Like Circus Ponies? (Invisible Adjuct)

He was giving away Zippos for answering a survey.... So, even though I don't smoke, I took the survey. He asked what I smoked, and I answered "Marlboro Lights." Divine inspiration. Then he asked the tough question. "Hard or soft?" Well, I had no idea cigarettes could hard or soft. I was pretty sure they were one consistency -- rolled up stuff.... I'm a horrible story-maker-upper. He gave me the lighter anyway, even though I am a fake. --Julie Young --Buy 3 & $ave (Work in Progress)

Yet another reason why you shouldn't trust surveys. Fakers like Julie lie for trinkets, and the results are published somewhere in a magazine.

Moveable Type FrustrationLiteracy Weblog)

I've been using MT since the middle of September and haven't had a single problem with it -- until now. Since some time over the weekend, none of the 40 or so authors on blogs.setonhill.edu have been able to post comments. They can still post blog entries, but we can't comment anymore, which really disrupts the culture that had developed online.

I've sent technical requests to the MT forums and to my ISP, but am at the moment completely in the dark, and won't be able to get back online until later tonight (though I doubt it would do much good even if I could). Since the students are due to submit their weblog portfolios soon, this is extremely frustrating -- for my students and for me. (My own weblog runs Will Gayther's JWeblog, so comments still work here.)

Is it possible to write a policy for academic blogging that respects a university's mission but doesn't amount to censorship? The vice-president for academic affairs asked me to draft a policy for student bloggers. Since we are a Catholic institution, the administrator's off-the-top-of-her-head suggestions included suggestions like "no foul language" and "no links to porn". Since it's possible that an anonymous commenter (or spammer) might leave offensive content on a site, or the contents of a page linked to by a blogger might change, and since a student might actually want to research the usage of a curse word or do a feminist study of pornography, I don't think a list of "thou shalt nots" is going to help. (We've already had one of those lists for thousands of years, and so far it hasn't solved all of our proglems.) --Dennis G. Jerz --Examples/Discussion on Academic Blogging Policies? (KairosNews)

Phone Pranks and Gender on CampusLiteracy Weblog)

I'm at my desk, working late. The phone rings. An unfamiliar female voice says, "What's your favorite scary movie?"

I tell her I don't have one.

"That's a very nice blue shirt you are wearing," the voice continues. "It goes well with your red tie."

I look out my window, but the buildings I can see from here are all dark. It's a little creepy, but only a little. The student tells me her name, tells me she's calling from a darkened classroom in the admin building, and tells someone else in the room to turn on the light. I recognize at least one of the students she is with; they all wave cheerfully, and I get back to work. Later, a colleague of mine is rather annoyed to learn of the incident, saying that even if the students had no malicous intent, they were too old for prank calls. But I can't really get myself worked up about it; I did plenty of silly stuff when I was 20, and I don't think it harmed anyone.

As a male working at a historically female school -- one which is actively recruiting more males -- I see some interesting gender dynamics at this school. Some of the upperclass female students are very unhappy about having to share their power with the male students in the sophomore and freshman classes.

Had I been a female, working alone at night, and had a group of male students called me up, made a reference to a movie that features the terrorization and murder of a woman, and made comments about my clothing, would I have felt differently? Food for thought.

High schools no longer prepare most students to express ideas coherently or follow accepted English, let alone carry on serious intellectual work..... The task falls to me -- in courses ostensibly about specified topics, not composition -- to patch up these leaky vessels.... I hold that a university education ought to include a significant writing component, that student writing deserves substantial professorial comment, that every student can become a better writer with practice, and that this is the last effective chance for them to get practice and feedback. If not us, who? --Max Clio

--Grading on My Nerves (Chronicle)

[H]umor is very important in the classroom: it can keep students' attention, it can diffuse tense situations, it can encourage creativity, and it can call attention to absurdity (and sometimes absurdity deserves it, whether its a social phenomena or inherent to a student comment). I even make a number of wisecracks or sarcastic comments, which sometimes -- when I hear what I just said -- make me laugh out loud during lectures (this actually happened in my poetry class today...and the students kept laughing, which made me laugh even longer... you know how that goes). --Mike Arnzen --Make 'em Laugh (Pedablogue)

Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) will offer a Ph.D. in Digital Media, starting fall 2004. The program, one of the first of its kind worldwide, is aimed at educating research-oriented theorist/practitioners who will bring the traditions of the humanities and arts to the design of digital media. Graduates of the program will be prepared to work in industry, public service, and universities, where they will help to shape the emerging digital genres and to expand our understanding and mastery of the representational power of the computer. --PhD in Digital Media (Ga Tech)

Janet Murray is launching this program, which sounds absolutely wonderful. Found on GTA.

I used to read research papers as one would read comic books, eager to see what comes next, reveling about the subtlety of the artwork and the colors. After getting an insider's view of academe, I recognize that: 1. Now I would rather read comic books than research papers, and 2. The main, most pervasive, and powerful incentive in academe is ... the ego. --Eduardo Zea --Moving Out (Chronicle)

At this stressful time in the year, I found this article was useful as salt to rub into my wounds. I actually feel like I'm having a great semester, but it has taken a while to fall into the rhythms of SHU culture. My TA was depressed today because, when she was announcing the hours she would be available to consult with students before their upcoming oral reports, only one person bothered to write down what she was saying. And, of course the pressure to teach well is affecting my ability to carry through on my research obligations. (Sigh.)

I just used in-class role-playing to introduce my students to the difference between scholarly publishing, publishing on a personal website, and journalism. Poor Nicole spent two and a half years (simulated time) trying to get her article published in an academic journal, and ended up publishing it in Golf Digest. Other students stood in as editors and peer reviewers.

After being rejected by one journal, Nicole submitted her paper to Carl's website, and Carl didn' t have to consult anyone else in order to decide whether to accept it or reject it.

Then Amanda role-played a reporter, and I role-played her editor. Amanda called on the telephone all the students who had been earlier role-playing as academic experts, and I followed her around barking reminders about deadlines, and you could see Amanda step up the pace in an effort to contact enough sources before the time was up.

I had only planned a very brief role-play, but the class took to it so well that I punted my PowerPoint. I had the scenarios all worked out in my head because I have actually been planning a comic-book style presentation of the same subject matter. I have the storyboards roughed out, but I have no delusions about my artistic ability. Anybody out there with drawing talent?

Video games have received more attention over the past several years as their revenue has grown faster than any other form of digital entertainment. Gross revenue from video-game hardware and software sales has surpassed revenues from movie ticket sales, video rentals and concert tickets, according to Mike Goodman, senior analyst with the Yankee Group. --Katie Dean --Academics Can Be Fun and Games (Wired)

I was reading a New York Times article on financial aid, and how rich schools like Stanford get more aid money than regular colleges that actually educate average or lower-income students. Then, out of no where, came Seton Hill. --Julie Young spots a quote from SHU's president. --Rich Schools Get More Financial Aid Money (Work in Progress)

On the same day she spoke about media panics to my journalism class, Torill Mortensen introduced my "Writing for the Internet" class to hypertext theory. (This is going to be a long post and I'll probably be too lazy to link everything properly, so see Torill's online lecture notes, "Hypertext, class and power.")

She began by asking the class to visualize taking a book and cutting it up, line by line, and gluing the words all together -- you could read the whole thing in one very cumbersome, very long, line. (She corrected herself -- actually, you would need to cut up two books!)

She introduced Vannevar Bush, an American scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, who felt the need to find something constructive for the scientists of the world to do once World War II was over. (This reminded me of the passion of Mr. Antrobus in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.)

She introduced Bush's Memex, and noted that its strength was that it organizes information not according to random order such as alphabetization, but the way our brains function -- by association. Even the most disciplined thinkers don't think according to a relentlessly rational, linear argument. (Here, I thought of a passage in Virgina Wolf's To the Lighthouse, which presents male thought as rational, attempting to progress firmly from A to Z, but shows a male character becoming frustrated because when he tries to move from A to Z by firmly focusing on each letter in his mind's eye, by the time he gets somewhere around Q or R, he finds his mind wandering.)

Torill worked her way through Englebart's "Mother of All Demonstrations," Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and Habermas's didactic philosophy of the media as a democratic conversation (rather than as a one-way flow from the aristocracy downward). She compared sophisticated, painstakingly constructed blogs which "reek of cultural capital" to the "bararian blogs" which have no cultural pretension.

She also shared a few stories from blogging lore, including "Damn the Pacific" -- the joint blog of transoceanic lovers, one of them dying from cancer, who begged for donations to fund plane tickets. Google actually caches at least some of the pages from "Damn the Pacific" -- so the story hasn't completely vanished from cyberspace. (I was rightfully booed by my own class when I asked whether Lane's new boyfriend also has cancer. Sorry about that, everyone.)

The saga of Kaycee Nicole also helped concretize the theory. Kaycee was the imaginary cancer-striken daughter of a blogger who doubly traumatized her audience -- first by killing off her daughter, and second by admitting the daughter never existed. (Here, I thought of Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which features an imaginary son, created by a childless couple as a means to cope with their psychoses, and also as a weapon to use against each other.)

We also talked about Jill Walker's posts in which she makes oblique references to her breakup with another blogger, and Torill pointed out a current message on Jill's blog that is a coded announcement (for those who can read between the lines) that Jill is seeing someone new and is very happy about it. Jill says that, while her blog may appear to reveal quite a lot about her personal life, she still chooses what to reveal and how. The way I see it, her autobiographical blogging gives her control over the events in her life -- or at least over the way the readers of her blog perceive her life.

After Torill's lecture, I introduced her to Julie Young, whose blog I discovered while I was still competing for my current job. The content of Julie's weblog on "blogs.setonhill.edu" is a little different than her earlier blog, and she has admitted that she also keeps a "secret" blog where she can write juicier gossip than she wants to post on her academic blog.

"Doesn't everybody keep a secret blog?" Torill asked.

I don't have a secret bog... this is it, folks.Torill @ Seton Hill University -- 'Intro to Hypertext Theory'Literacy Weblog)

In my "Practice of Journalism" class yesterday, Torill Mortensen used examples from her native Norway to discuss media panics surrounding the introduction of new technology in society. There has long been a connection between new media, in whatever form it took -- from moving pictures, to TV, to computer games... in the 1970s, Norwegian Parlament had passionate debates over how the introduction of color television would affect the delicate and fragile women in society -- would the increased realism confuse their perception of reality?

Torill described the media circus that surrounded her own doctoral defense. The average Norwegian subscribes to three newspapers, and doctoral defenses are huge ceremonial affairs that stretch out over months. (I just sat in a room with five people for about two hours, avoided saying anything too stupid, and came out a doctor. Torill's dissertation defense included a swordfight. Really!)

Torill observed that, because she was completing a dissertation on computer games, the Norwegian press contacted her for her opinion on computer games. Reporters repeatedly asked her whether computer games were harmful, and wanted to hear her say that games are good for you. She hadn't actually studied that question, so she didn't give the short answer the reporters were searching for. So the reporters quoted her as saying comptuer games are good for you -- something Torill never said. Google found over 300 references to that imaginary quotation. Torill insisted that the journalists who interviewed her aren't stupid. I saw it as a perfect example of the confirmation bias -- and I couldn't resist the opportunity to jump in at that point and deliver a mini-lecture to my students, some of whom have announced that for their term project they will write an investigative journalism piece that proves that people feel X about subject Y. (I asked them to go into their research with an open mind, without thinking of themselves as an advocate for one side.)

We learned the proper way to pronounce "ombudsman," and learned that, while American popular culture is censored in some parts of Europe because of its violent nature, France has in the past poured resources into the funding of French-language popular culture, with the intention of competing with the American imports; and Norway is apparently attempting this strategy as well.

Some quoteworthy statements Torill made:

"If you use violence to solve everyday problems, you will learn more violent actions by imitating violence in media."

"Isolated people believe real life is more violent than it really is."

Torill @ Seton Hill University -- 'Games and Media Panics'Literacy Weblog)

Torill 'thinking with my fingers' Mortensen @ Seton Hill UniversityLiteracy Weblog)

For the past few days, I have been showing Torill's "thinking with my fingers" blog to my new media journalism students. Around the time that our own "New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University" blog was lagging, Torill posted about the lack of personal touch in group blogs. And since many of my students reported, in their midterm blog portfolios, how disappointed they felt when the blog entries they worked hardest on didn't attract comments, I called my student's attention to Torill's position on blog comments (on MGK she has written, "While I can see the value of them, I don't want the hazzle of maintaining and editing a blog where I need to check to see what others may have written into it. I treasure my peaceful little slot on the net.").

It took a bit of effort, but I managed to get some students a little worked up about the things that this Dr. Mortensen was saying. When some students on Monday offered to send her nasty e-mails, I sort of choked for a moment -- I hadn't expected a response that strong. This morning, one student apologized for forgetting to write an e-mail.

At any rate, because Torill and I had agreed to keep her visit a secret, we imagined that she could make a dramatic entrance, so I left her in a computer lab on the floor below, and started class for a few minutes before sending a student to get her.

When I flashed her bio on the screen, Jen recognized her -- "I think I just saw her in the lab downstairs!" Jen knew something was up... maybe Torill Mortensen isn't really a Norwegian blogger -- maybe this exotic foreigner is just imaginary, or maybe I have asked a friend to come into the class and pose as "Dr. Mortensen" in order to make some obscure pedagogical point.

"Would I do that to you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

I'll blog some more about Torill's presentation later... in one class, she spoke of the technology panic in the Norwegian media, and in the other she gave an excellent, well-paced introduction to hypertext theory.

She's downstaris in the comptuer room, probably blogging away. It's so encouraging to find out that I'm not the only person who's so addicted to the Internet! Anyway, we're going to meet up with my family and have an enjoyable evening (if the kids aren't too rambunctious). Then tomorrow I'll take her to the airport, where she will continue on her US lecture tour.

Professors today often believe erroneously that they are already teaching critical thinking in their courses and that students are absorbing it... "[College seinors] say, 'Look how open-minded I am.' But when pressed to say, 'What do you think about this? What suggestions would you make and what are they based on?' - that's when the process falls apart. They are unable to reach or defend a conclusion that's most reasonable and consistent with the facts." -- Patricia King, quoted in an article by Mark Clayton --Rethinking Thinking (Christian Science Monitor)